Grief: A Paradoxical Pathway to Joy - Jennifer Wright, MA, NCC, LPC
“I thought I could describe a state, make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process.” ”
Over the years, it has been increasingly clear that God has called me to educate clients about grief. Grief has become a consistent theme in my work. And grief is not always attributed to just death. Frequently related to the losses of relationships, jobs, experiences, dreams, and ideas, grief finds roots in various causes. Additionally, grief can be associated with transitions and often correlates with the fallout of trauma.
Grief and fear go hand in hand. Typically, we fear grief because we do not
understand it well. Grief is a necessary process by which we honor the thing, the person, the dream, the experience that has been lost. The greater the
significance, the greater the depth of the grief. And, ultimately, the greater the joy that was attached to the loss. CS Lewis states it well in this quote from A Grief Observed, “there is nothing we can do with suffering except suffer it.” God calls us to move into that place—where we must trust that He meets us and minsters to our aching hearts.
Adding to the discomfort and difficulty of grief is the reality that grief is not a “one size fits all” experience. Human hearts are designed to grieve uniquely—varying from person to person; from situation to situation. The grief process does not have a timeframe and is not defined by prescription.
For example, as a former paramedic, I have an affinity for working with individuals who are employed as medical professionals and as first responders. These types of individuals present unique challenges when walking with them through grief (no matter if the source is job related or personal) because they have developed specific coping mechanisms in order to be able to perform their jobs. Without the ability to cope, these individuals would be rendered incapacitated.
From my personal experience, I had to learn to detach from traumatic, tragic, and stressful scenarios in order to execute the skills and interventions commiserate with my training and that were required of me in specific situations. Coping mechanisms included emotional detachment, compartmentalization, and morbid joking--- often termed “gallows humor.” Such coping mechanisms prevent the individual from feeling deeply about especially difficult situations—those in which the lay person may freeze, become fearful, and/or utterly overwhelmed.
By contrast, the medical professional can make critical decisions and administer lifesaving and sophisticated interventions. However, these same coping mechanisms can make the necessary grieving process more challenging for these first responders and medical professionals.
The aforementioned example illustrates the paradox of grief. Our resistance to the experience (and, at times, the things we must do in order to survive and/or perform in our jobs or everyday lives) can lead to a more protracted experience of grief. Whereas, leaning in and succumbing to the process brings about relief and healing over time (or, at the very least, less pain).
As humans, fallible and broken, we inherently do not grieve well—specifically in American culture. In fact, we do our best to avoid grieving. Grief is a decidedly uncomfortable process—one often fueled by fear in which we tend to rush, to push to “get over”, to “move past”—because we anticipate the dread of being overwhelmed and swallowed by its power. Grief is not a thing to ‘get over” and does not always have a definitive end. Through the grief process it is possible to learn and change. Although it may seem unimaginable at the outset, we can learn to live with the void in our hearts left by loss or death. We change and adapt to living amid the loss. We learn to cope—ideally in a healthy manner. We can, eventually, return to joy.